City of Londoners: PM Boris Johnson = Disaster

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 5/28/2019 12:59:00 PM
Some fat white guy with weird "blonde" hair: from the US to the UK, it brings disaster. This is a no-brainer: when the likely next prime minister of the United kingdom has said "f--k business" when asked about Brexit's fallout on British commerce, businesspersons are going to be concerned. With the recent resignation of Theresa May from that post, and Boris Johnson (former London mayor) being the front-runner, denizens of the City of London are antsy. Will he be the kryptonite of the financial services industry that plays an outsized role in UK commerce? Folks in the City are pessimistic on the arch-Brexiteer Johnson,...
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Big Biz: Helping Move Mfg Out of China

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 5/23/2019 04:03:00 PM
Trade war or not, manufacturing in the lowest-cost sectors will inevitably move out of China to places like Vietnam. How do you make money in China nowadays...as an export-oriented concern? Yes, this is a trick question whose answer should be obvious from the post title. Firms that help manufacturing concerns move their production facilities to lower-cost locations in the aftermath of Trump's trade war is the obvious answer here. Notably, while rising costs in China have already become plenty evident--higher wages and more stringent labor and environmental regulations--the forthcoming declaration of total tariffication...
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How Gen. Franco Begat Spanish MotoGP Dominance

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 5/19/2019 06:07:00 PM
A long-dead dictator set into motion the dominance of sporting figures like Marc Marquez and Jorge Lorenzo. I've been paying more attention than usual to MotoGP, the top flight of motorcycle racing. Formerly, there were three classes--500cc, 250cc, and 125cc denoting different engine displacements. Eventually, these have been rebranded MotoGP, Moto2, and Moto3, respectively. Regardless, even a casual viewer like myself will notice that a lot of the top riders and teams in these competitions are Spanish. How did this happen? As it turns out, there is a potentially interesting history behind it all. One of the most fascinating...
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Trump on LDCs: Give Shitholes Food Aid

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,,, at 5/13/2019 04:37:00 PM
Feed Shithole Countries Program [FSCP]--a forthcoming American "gift" to the world? Sometime ago, precisely zero people were surprised when US President Donald Trump characterized what were understood to be poor, migrant-sending countries as "shitholes." Rising to political prominence on a false, racist claim--the Obama "birther" conspiracy--displaying such verbal animus was to be expected. More recently, though, Trump has been toying with the idea that all the agricultural products which would have been sold to China can instead be purchased by the US government and distributed to these "shithole" countries as food aid....
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US-China Trade Negos: The 'Rashomon' Effect

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 5/09/2019 10:45:00 AM
This guy looks about as crazy as Trump, which is no mean feat. How Rashomon explains international economic diplomacy. Blame in on Akira Kurosawa. The famed Japanese director's acclaimed film Rashomon featured the same event--a murder--as narrated by four different parties, to vastly different versions. Today, we have the same thing going on with trade negotiations that have been occurring between Chinese and American negotiators. The accounts are so vastly different that the rest of us aren't exactly sure whose version is accurate given that there is so little overlap. As the late film critic Roger Ebert keenly observed...
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Paris Plays for Brexit’s Refugees

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in at 5/02/2019 12:00:00 PM
Paris' main financial district is La Defense. Nowadays, they aren't defending themselves from English speakers, apparently.  When it comes to bourgeois world leaders, they don't come much posher than French President Emmanuel Macron. A former investment banker, there were fears before he ran for the highest office in the land that he'd be an easy target for being out of touch with the common man. And so it has proven: for months and months, he's had to endure endless protests from the "yellow vest" movement. Interestingly enough, though, Macron is still intent on luring more of those like him from London to Paris...
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